CSM9: Week Four

I need to take better notes.

This’ll be a short one, partly because of the above, partly because it’s been what we’ll keep simple and label a busy week outside EVE (no doubt my seventeen readers noticed the drop in output!), and partly because the weeks before patch releases are always relatively quiet on the CSM front.

I guess we’ll see if that last one changes a bit as CCP gets more accustomed to the new release cycle.

Anyway! The key word there was relatively quiet. In this context, I mean no new feature posts, no significant discussion of upcoming changes, that kind of stuff. However, the introductory meetings march onward, with no less than five this past week. The last of them, with Team Superfriends, quickly moved on past introductions and got into their plans after Crius and beyond. Our enthusiasm led the discussion astray more than a few times, so hopefully they didn’t find that too overbearing!

One thing I am going to reiterate is that I’ve got a feedback page now. It’s titled topic submission, but really, use it for any sort of feedback.

On the feedback side of things, we’re certainly still actively engaged with the ongoing industry refinement work, but even when it’s real-time chat on Skype (Greyscale, Steve Ronuken & myself have amassed probably several hours of such chat over the course of this week!) it’s almost entirely prompted by public posts such as this thread rather than new things being run past us before pushing to the public. Barring some curveball that’s a trend I expect will continue past Kronos until a good ways towards Crius, at least so far as Superfriends and Game of Drones are concerned – and why not? The overall scope of the industry changes as well as the details are public already, leaving very little reason not to do the refinement work in the open, with open feedback as much as possible. But at some point the designers on those teams will shift attention to beyond Crius… and there’s always Team Five-0, whose post-Kronos work I’m very excited about.

I was going to wrap this up by piggybacking on Sugar Kyle‘s opening topic, a simple question posed to her: “What is the CSM like?” I’m also an ‘infovore’ as she put it (and easily distracted), which means I at least read if not participate in virtually every discussion, in ever channel, as much as work and real life allows. Rather than rehash her response, I’m going to just say go read it… because her explanation is great and I’m not sure what else I’d add.

One last thing I do want to reiterate is that I have a feedback section, and while it’s titled “topic submission”, go ahead and drop whatever in there. In fact, by the time you read this, I’ll probably have changed the title anyway!